A wide variety of techniques for interfacing passengers with elevators are known in the art. One class of devices call an elevator to a floor to pick up a passenger, which may be as simple as the well-known up/down call buttons. More recent call destination systems might display many numbered floor buttons, or might consist of ten-key destination floor call devices. Entering a destination floor into a multi-keyed call device requires a moment of concentration and some care. Still other devices include card readers as well as hand-held call devices and smart badges which operate in a wireless fashion, such as using electromagnetic radiation (RF, IR), to indicate the desire to be picked up on a certain floor, the desired destination floor, and possibly the security access for the destination floor.
To inform passengers which elevators will serve them, the technique might be as simple as up/down directional lanterns which light as an elevator approaches a floor, or which light immediately (or fairly soon) after a call is placed. For remote call devices and certain of the destination call devices, an indication may appear on the device itself, such indication comprising a symbol indicative of the elevator which will respond to that call.
During morning rush hour, up peak elevator traffic may be handled without any call devices. In the simplest of techniques, passengers simply walk in and observe on a panel adjacent each elevator the floor numbers of the group of floors being served by any particular elevator which is, or is about to be, standing at the landing. This is sometimes referred to as “channeling”, as is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,804,069 entitled “Contiguous Floor Channeling Elevator Dispatching” and U.S. Pat. No. 4,846,311, entitled “Optimized ‘Up-Peak’ Elevator Channeling System with Predicted Traffic Volume Equalized Sector Assignments”. Assigning sectors to different elevators is one of the ways that traffic flow is increased. This of course makes it more difficult for passengers to determine which elevator to take.
In systems having destination call panels, it has been known to provide, typically by means of a letter, the indication of the elevator which is to serve a group of floors including the floor of the destination which has just been entered on the call device. However, the use of the destination call device itself slows down the flow of rush hour traffic.